The president of the United States will release a binder full of new gun-control executive orders on Wednesday. Instead of standing alone, bearing full responsibility for the imperial actions he is about to take, President Obama will surround himself with an audience of kids who wrote to him after the Newtown, Conn., school massacre. This is the most cynical in Beltway theatrical staging — a feckless attempt to invoke “For the Children” immunity by hiding behind them.

To that list we can now add “argumentum ad filium”: If politicians appeal to the children, it’s unassailably good and true. The Obama White House has shamelessly employed this kiddie human shield strategy at every turn to blunt substantive criticism and dissent.

During the legislative battle that rammed the federal health care takeover through Capitol Hill and down our throats, President Obama and the Democrats piled up youth props around them like bunker sandbags. Nancy Pelosi wore babies like Wonder Woman bracelets, one on each arm, to deflect troublesome questions about costs and constitutional concerns.

Michelle links to a story she wrote in 2000about what she calls “the most notorious examples of poster child abuse involving anailing 7-year-old girl named Jennifer Bush.” <<<Hit that link – it is worth reading in full. It’s a tale that in a sane world would have served as a warning to politicians to beware the personal anecdote – aka sob stories.

Six years ago, Jennifer’s mother wrote a widely-publicized letter to the White House. “Do you know what it is like to choose between purchasing groceries for the week to feed your family or buying needed medications for your chronically ill child?” Kathleen Bush asked.

Pale and wan, young Jennifer suffered from unidentified chronic digestive problems and myriad ailments from birth. She had her gall bladder, appendix, and fragments of her intestines removed. Those organs were replaced with a tangled cable of feeding tubes that constricted Jennifer’s 43-pound frame. Surgeons threaded a catheter into the girl’s heart. After 200 hospital visits and 40 operations, the Bush family had racked up medical bills worth more than $2 million.

Puzzled doctors and nurses scratched their heads over Jennifer’s 33,000-page medical file. The media ran maudlin profiles of the family. With TV crews in tow, saintly mother and sickly child headed up to Capitol Hill to campaign for Clinton-sponsored health insurance mandates.

Politicians unquestioningly embraced the Bushes and their tale of need. Hillary cuddled with seven-year-old Jennifer for the cameras; their mugs were splashed on the pages of USA Today and newspapers across the country. Shamelessly coached, Jennifer gave the Clintons a lucky silver dollar “to bring you good luck so everyone can have good insurance.” In another pre-programmed, kiddie-sized soundbite, Jennifer dutifully told the press: “I pray every night that I can get better – and that everyone can have insurance.”

Long after all that positive media attention, it was discovered that the child was being poisoned by her depraved, welfare cheating mother. She was removed from her family in 1996 and thrived. The mother was sentenced to five years in prison on two counts of aggravated child abuse and one count of fraud.

She also pled guilty to a separate count of welfare fraud for misrepresenting $60,000 in assets on Medicaid forms. “There was probably more abuse in this single case,” lead prosecutor Bob Nichols noted, “than in all of the child-abuse cases I’ve prosecuted in my life combined.”

The little girl who was held up as the poster child for more government spending on health care would be be the poster child for LESS government spending if the MSM were interested in reporting the truth instead of promoting left-wing agendas.

At least six states say they are seriously considering taking some sort of legislative action against the government on the new gun control laws. They include Alabama, Missouri, South Carolina, Montana, Texas and Wyoming. Many more sheriffs around the country are also calling for action.
Via America’s Newsroom:

What is so interesting about this is what Rogers (who hails from the great state of Texas) is upset about; Obama’s lack of leadership and association with corrupt financial interests. Hmmm. She has a point there.

The response from Democrats? Wait for the tolerance… They pulled her campaign funding. She won her primary anyway.

Via Your Black World:Kesha Rogers is no longer getting any form of backing from the Democratic Party. The woman who once had aspirations of running for Congress, has lost the support of the party for committing a serious political sin: Calling for the impeachment of President Obama.

The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg has an eye-opening piece for Bloomberg that reveals in stark terms what President Obama really thinks of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as Israel itself. As The Telegraph’s Middle East correspondent Robert Tait reports:

The damning assessment of the Israeli prime minister, relayed by senior White House officials to an American journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg, is the most graphic sign yet of the toxic relationship between the two men, who have clashed continually over the stalled Middle East peace process.

Writing on the Bloomberg website, Goldberg quoted Mr Obama as repeatedly saying, “Israel doesn’t know what its own best interests are” in response to a spate of recent announcements for thousands of new Jewish settler homes in east Jerusalem and the West Bank on land the Palestinians want for a future state.

… “If Israel, a small state in an inhospitable region, becomes more of a pariah – one that alienates even the affections of the US, its last steadfast friend – it won’t survive,” Goldberg writes, paraphrasing Mr Obama’s words. “Iran poses a short-term threat to Israel’s survival; Israel’s own behaviour poses a long-term one.” Mr Obama also believes the Israeli prime minister is a “political coward” who is incapable of making concessions to the Palestinians because he has “become captive of Jewish settler lobby”.

President Obama’s contempt for Netanyahu is already well known, as he amply displayed in a private meeting with then French president Nicolas Sarkozy at the G-20 in November 2011, where he reportedly told his French counterpart in reference to the Israeli PM: “you’re fed up with him, but I have to deal with him every day!” Obama refused to meet with Netanyahu when he visited the United States in September last year, while finding the time to appear on the David Letterman show, and has a long track record of snubbing the Israeli PM.

LaborUnionReport: Group Calls For Corruption-Tainted Attorney To Resign From Obama’s Union-Dominated NLRB:

You know, the last time a member of Obama’s union-tainted National Labor Relations Board was urged to resign, it created quite a stir:

“The time has come for Richard Griffin to put aside his commitment to rewarding his fellow Big Labor bosses to the detriment of American employees and employers, and resign his post as a member of the National Labor Relations Board. The recent complaint that names him as a defendant and details his role in an embezzlement scheme clearly makes him unsuited to serve as an unbiased arbiter deciding matters that significantly impact American workers and small businesses,” said Fred Wszolek, spokesperson for the Workforce Fairness Institute (WFI).

In his news conference on Monday, President Obama bragged about his deficit reduction prowess. He claimed to have already cut spending $1.4 trillion. If you combine that with $600 billion in tax hikes from the fiscal cliff deal plus interest savings, it “adds up to a total of $2.5 trillion.”

But a closer look at the numbers shows that Obama is exaggerating how much deficit reduction he’s actually achieved, and is being decidedly Pollyannaish about the nation’s still massive long-term budget gap and what will be needed to close it.

Fiscal restraint, in Boustany’s terms, is defined by spending twice on items unrelated to the main subject matter of a bill than the actual subject matter of the bill. Or whatever Boehner tells him to vote for, perhaps.

The Sandy bill is significant in this respect – Boehner had vowed, while he was attempting to head off a Republican revolt to deny him another term as Speaker, that he wouldn’t go against a majority of Republican House members in pushing a bill.

But he did, just tonight. There were 49 Republican “Yes” votes, 179 Republican “No” votes. Boehner has now sold out the GOP caucus which re-elected him. His promise didn’t even last two weeks.

And because of that, you can have zero faith that Boehner will hold the line against Obama on either the debt limit or the continuing resolution which passes for a budget. It’s over; Boehner has fulfilled the prophecy Jeff Landry made on his way out of Congress that he would lead the GOP to the loss of the House thanks to poor, uninspired leadership. Going against the majority of your membership to force through a bill with 67 percent of its spending being unrelated to the subject at hand is poor, uninspired leadership by any reasonable definition.

As an aside, if you’re in Louisiana, you can wind your watch by the prediction that the Times-Picayune’s Jarvis DeBerry, who has used the Sandy relief issue to take two cheap shots at those Republicans who actually care about restricting spending to what is being voted on in the past week, will gleefully hammer away at them a third time – regardless of the $34 billion in pork the bill contains.

Because as he said this morning…

Mulvaney said the $51 billion bill is loaded with pork. It would be hard to imagine a bill of that size that isn’t. Lawmakers routinely seize opportunities such as this to fund projects that they’d never be able to fund individually.

So it really doesn’t matter that the politicians in Washington, who have put the country at risk of another downgrade by the bond rating agencies through unrestrained profligate spending, continue speeding down the road to Greece. That’s over DeBerry’s head. All he knows is Republicans are mean and they voted against Sandy relief.

This is an editorial columnist at what used to be a major newspaper.

But it’s worse than that. Because not only is the public polluted with imbecilic opinions in major “flyover country” papers like those DeBerry inflicts on the Picayune’s readers every day, the output is even worse in Washington. We ran across this piece at The Hill by John Feehery, a Republican “strategist” and former longtime House leadership staffer, entitled “Time To Purge.” It’s about how Boehner should kick the 12 Republican members who voted against his re-election as speakership out of the party.

Remember all the controversy over the House refusing to pass the Senate’s version of the Hurricane Sandy relief bill, because they said there was too much pork in it?

The Democrats screeched that the Republicans were heartless jerks, and Chris Christie lost his freaking mind, holding a theatrical press conference in which he declared that the House Republicans were a bunch of meaniepants who hated New Jersey.

Hooray, the House Republicans refused to be bullied! They stuck to the principles of fiscal conservatism! They resisted the pressure from the Left and the MSM and the Overemotional Sturdily-Built New Jersey Governors, and they rejected the Senate’s Sandy relief bill for being a pork-filled pile of crap…

…and then they turned around and passed their very own pork-filled pile of crap.

Sure, they want to listen to “We the People,” but maybe not so often. The site doesn’t amount to much more than an occasional earned-media tool that occasionally earns a non-answer from the White House, but earned media and public shaming can occasionally be helpful, as in the case of this petition which asks the Senate to pass a budget.

But don’t worry. The fact that the most “engaged” White House in history doesn’t want to be overburdened with engaging with you is a measure of great success for— who else?— the White House!